MOSCOW – When the team of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny urged people to go to residential courtyards and light their cell phones in a demonstration of unity, many responded with jokes and skepticism. After two weekends of demonstrations across the country, the new protest format seemed to some to be a retreat.
But not for the Russian authorities, who acted vigorously to extinguish the enlightened protests planned for Sunday.
Authorities accused Navalny’s allies of acting in accordance with NATO instructions. Kremlin-backed TV channels have warned that the flashlight demonstrations were part of major uprisings around the world. State news agencies cited unidentified sources, saying a terrorist group was planning attacks during unapproved mass protests.
The repression attempts represent a change in tactics for the authorities who once tried to weaken Navalny’s influence by wiping it out.
Kremlin-controlled TV channels used to ignore protests called by Navalny. Russian President Vladimir Putin never mentioned the name of his most prominent critic. State news agencies referred to the politician and anti-corruption investigator as “a blogger” in the rare stories they published mentioning him.
“Navalny went from a person whose name cannot be mentioned to the main topic of discussion” on state TV, Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations at the Navalny Foundation to Combat Corruption, said in a YouTube video on Friday.
Pevchikh credited Navalny’s latest exposure for the sudden increase in attention. The two-hour video of its foundation claiming that a luxurious palace on the Black Sea was built for Putin through elaborate corruption has been viewed more than 111 million times on YouTube since it was posted on January 19.
The video was shown two days after Navalny was arrested on his return from Germany to Russia, where he spent five months recovering from a nervous agent poisoning he attributes to the Kremlin. The Russian government denies involvement and said it had no evidence that Navalny was poisoned.
Although the high-profile prison and subsequent exposure was a double blow to the authorities, the Kremlin’s political analyst and former speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov says keeping Navalny and his activity out of the air to deprive him additional advertising no longer makes sense.
“The fact that this strategy has changed suggests that the pro-government television audience is somehow receiving information about Navalny’s performance from other channels, recognizes him, is interested in his work and, in that sense, it makes no sense to keep quiet . ”Said Gallyamov.
The weekend protests in several cities over the past month over Navalny’s arrest have been the biggest manifestation of popular discontent in years and appear to have shaken the Kremlin.
The police arrested some 10,000 people and many protesters were beaten, while state media sought to minimize the scale of the protests.
TV channels broadcast images of empty squares in cities where protests were announced and claimed that few people attended. Some reports portrayed the police as polite and restrained, claiming that police officers helped people with disabilities to cross busy streets, distributed masks to protesters and offered them hot tea.
As soon as the protests ended and Navalny’s ally Leonid Volkov announced a break until spring, Kremlin-backed media reported that grassroots flash mobs entitled “Putin is our president” began to sweep the country. State news channel Rossiya 24 broadcast videos from different cities of people dancing patriotic songs and waving Russian flags, describing them as a genuine expression of support for Putin.
Several independent online media reported that the instructions for recording videos in support of Putin came from the Kremlin and the ruling United Russia party, and that people who participated in some of the recordings were invited to film under false pretenses.
Russian President Dmitry Peskov’s spokesman said the Kremlin had nothing to do with pro-Putin videos.
After Navalny’s team posted their video involving the palace supposedly built for Putin, the state channel Rossiya broadcast its own complaint about Navalny. Anchorman Dmitry Kiselev said that while working on research in Germany, Navalny lived “in the luxury he so despises”.
The reporter sent to report the alleged luxurious lifestyle that the politician maintained abroad filmed inside a house that Navalny rented, but was unable to capture any sophisticated items in the two-story building, which featured several rooms and a small pool.
She pointed to “two sofas, a TV, fresh fruit on the table” in the living room and “a kitchen with a coffee machine” and described a room as “luxurious”, although it was not much different from a room in a hotel. Business.
In the past few days, official media coverage has focused on plans for the protest against flashlights in this weekend’s courtyards. Reports extensively cited Navalny’s ally Volkov’s post on social media announcing the event and accused him of acting under instructions from his Western handlers, pointing to an online conference with European officials he attended the day before.
The political talk show “60 Minutes” devoted almost half an hour to the subject, calling the lantern rally an idea of a manual on revolutions. He displayed images of protesters using flashlights during the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine, mass rallies in Belarus last summer and other uprisings around the world.
On Thursday, state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti reported, citing anonymous sources, that a terrorist group in Syria was training insurgents for possible terrorist attacks in Russian cities “at mass rally sites”.
The reports did not refer to any specific protest. Nor are the public warnings against “unauthorized public events” from the office of the Prosecutor General and the Interior Ministry of Russia released on Thursday, although the ministry mentioned the events “planned for the nearest date”.
“The Kremlin is terribly frightened by the action of the flashlight”, because such a peaceful and joyful event would allow the opposition to build a relationship with new supporters who are not ready to be more visible and involved in the protests, said Volkov in a YouTube video.
He suggested that the violent response to the announcement really helped to dispel skepticism about the demonstrations in the courtyard.
“I saw a lot of social media posts (saying) ‘When Navalny’s headquarters announced the rally with lanterns, I thought it was silly … But when I saw the Kremlin’s reaction, I realized that they were right to suggest that.'”